Bro you probably have a monster mac pro with 256gb unified ram. I'm typing this on a N100 minipc. We're not the same. I just tried to switch to firefox (with 3 tabs including HN and youtube) and my load topped out at 2.5. I'm back to chrome now with the same tabs (and a couple more) and it's hovering at 1.

I've been using an n100 as my daily driver for months with librewolf and it's fine. I tend to end up with dozens of tabs at least before I finally decide I'll never sort through them and close the window.

16gb of ram also? I think it's youtube more than anything else. I am having a lot of problems with youtube, my other machine is a netbook which crashes while listening/watching to videos on youtube. Not sure why we put all our content (software engineering, etc) on that platform. It's awful.

I can confirm the youtube issue. No idea if it might be some edge case with my distro or hardware. Forcing a GC collection helps but input events to the entire browser still feel laggy until I restart it. It's been going on for years now.

It occurs to me that it could be a pathological edge case triggered by ublock and youtube interacting. I'm not going to disable it to find out.

Go to about:processes and kill the YouTube process. All YouTube tabs and embeds will be marked as crashed, with a button to reload them. The memory leak will be reset and you won't have to restart the whole browser.

I'm pretty sure the memory leak applies the longer you navigate the same youtube tab. If I browse a lot in one day it gets to the point of crashing if I don't open a new tab/window.